The Hatch Act of 1939 and the Line Between Government Work and Campaigning

In the summer of 1938, a newspaperman named Thomas Stokes drove around Kentucky asking people on the federal relief rolls a simple question: who had told them how to vote? The state was in the middle of a bitter Democratic Senate primary. The incumbent, Alben Barkley, was the Senate majority leader and Franklin Roosevelt's man; his challenger was the state's young governor, A. B. "Happy" Chandler. Tens of thousands of Kentuckians held jobs with the Works Progress Administration, the great New Deal agency that paid the unemployed to build roads, schools and sewers. What Stokes found, and what he published in a series for the Scripps-Howard papers, was a picture of relief work bent into a political machine: supervisors pressing workers to back the right candidate, contributions collected from people earning a few dollars a week, the unmistakable suggestion that a paycheck might depend on a ballot. Barkley won. Stokes won a Pulitzer Prize for the reporting. And a quiet senator from New Mexico named Carl Hatch decided that something in the system had to change.

In short: The Hatch Act of 1939 grew out of reports that New Deal relief jobs were being used to win votes, and it still draws the line between doing a government job and working for a campaign. Most federal employees today may vote, give money and volunteer on their own time, but they may not use their office, their workday or their title for partisan ends. The law is only as strong as the office that enforces it, which is why who runs that office matters.

A machine made of relief jobs

It helps to remember how new all of this was. Before the New Deal, the federal workforce was small and much of it had already been sorted out by an earlier reform, the Pendleton Act of 1883, which created a merit-based civil service after a disappointed office seeker shot President James Garfield. The Pendleton Act was about hiring: jobs should go to the qualified, not to the loyal. It said far less about what a government worker could do once hired.

Then came the Depression and, with it, millions of people drawing federal paychecks for the first time through programs like the WPA. Many of those positions sat outside the merit system altogether. That created an opening every political organizer could see. A party that controlled who got relief work, who kept it and who got the better assignments had something more valuable than a campaign war chest. It had leverage over families who needed the money to eat.

Kentucky was the loudest case but not the only one. A Senate committee chaired by Morris Sheppard of Texas investigated campaign spending and political activity in the 1938 elections and reported troubling practices involving relief administration in several states besides Kentucky. The findings were embarrassing to the administration, and they landed on a Congress already uneasy about how big the executive branch had become.

What Carl Hatch put into law

Hatch was a Democrat and generally a Roosevelt supporter, which made his bill harder to dismiss as partisan sniping. Its formal title said exactly what it aimed at: an act to prevent pernicious political activities. Roosevelt had doubts, and there was talk of a veto, but he signed it on August 2, 1939.

The 1939 law did a few things at once. It made it a crime to intimidate or coerce anyone into voting a certain way, or to promise or withhold a federal job or relief benefit in exchange for political support. It barred federal employees from using their official authority to interfere with or affect an election. And, most sweepingly, it barred most executive branch employees from taking an active part in political management or political campaigns. The next year Congress extended the core of the law to many state and local employees whose work was paid for with federal money.

Notice the two different ideas tangled together. One protects the public: nobody should have to buy their relief check with a vote. The other protects the government worker: nobody on the federal payroll should be ordered by a boss to knock on doors or kick back part of a salary to the party in power. Both ideas are about coercion. A rule that stops a supervisor from leaning on a clerk also, inevitably, limits what that clerk can do voluntarily, and that trade-off is what every later fight over the Hatch Act has been about.

The courts and the long argument over free speech

Opponents of the law have always had a serious argument, and it deserves to be stated plainly. Government workers are citizens. The First Amendment protects political speech above almost everything else. Telling millions of people that they cannot manage a campaign, or in the original version even take a visible role in one, looks like a large restriction on exactly the kind of expression the Constitution cares most about.

The Supreme Court heard that argument and rejected it twice. In United Public Workers v. Mitchell in 1947, the Court upheld the law against a challenge from federal employees, reasoning that Congress could limit partisan activity to protect the efficiency and integrity of the civil service. In 1973, in U.S. Civil Service Commission v. National Association of Letter Carriers, the Court did so again, at a moment when the Watergate scandal was teaching the country fresh lessons about what happens when government machinery is turned to political use. The justices accepted the core logic: a neutral civil service is worth some limits on the political activity of the people in it.

Congress, though, kept adjusting where the line sat. The biggest shift came in 1993, when the Hatch Act Reform Amendments, signed by President Bill Clinton, let most federal employees take an active part in partisan campaigns on their own time. A further revision in 2012, the Hatch Act Modernization Act, mostly changed the rules for state and local workers, letting many of them run for partisan office unless their salaries were paid entirely with federal funds.

What a federal employee can and cannot do today

Here is the rule in plain terms, as the Office of Special Counsel, the small independent agency that enforces the law, describes it. This is general information; anyone with a question about their own job should read the agency's guidance or ask its advisory staff.

Most federal employees, the ones the law calls less restricted, may:

1. Register, vote and express opinions about candidates and issues, in private and in public, when they are not on duty.
2. Contribute money to a party or candidate of their choice.
3. Volunteer for a campaign on their own time: make calls, knock on doors, help at events, put a sign in their yard.
4. Attend rallies and join a political party or club.
5. Run for office in nonpartisan elections, such as many school board races.

They may not:

1. Use their official title or authority to affect an election, such as asking a subordinate to support a candidate.
2. Ask for or accept political contributions from anyone, including through a social media fundraising appeal.
3. Run as a candidate in a partisan election, with limited exceptions for some local races in communities with many federal workers.
4. Engage in political activity while on duty, in a federal building, while wearing a uniform or official insignia, or while using a government vehicle.

A smaller group of employees, the further restricted, face tighter rules because of where they work. These include employees of the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service and several other enforcement and intelligence offices, along with career members of the Senior Executive Service. They generally may not take an active part in partisan campaigns at all, even off duty.

The president and vice president are not covered. Some senior political appointees, including certain White House staff and officials confirmed by the Senate, have narrow allowances for political activity during work hours, but they are still barred from using their office to influence elections and from soliciting money. Penalties run from reprimand and suspension up to removal, and the Merit Systems Protection Board decides contested cases for most career employees.

When the referee only blows the whistle

The Hatch Act has a design flaw that surfaced in full view during President Trump's first term. For career staff, the system works roughly as intended: the Office of Special Counsel investigates, and a violation can cost someone a job. For the most senior political appointees, the Special Counsel can only report findings to the president, who decides what, if anything, to do.

In June 2019, the Office of Special Counsel, led by a Trump appointee, recommended that White House counselor Kellyanne Conway be removed from federal service for repeatedly attacking Democratic presidential candidates while speaking in her official capacity. The White House declined to act on the recommendation, and Conway stayed. In 2020, the Republican National Convention used the White House grounds as a stage, and the secretary of state recorded a convention address while on an official trip abroad. A year later, the Office of Special Counsel issued a report concluding that a number of senior officials had violated the Hatch Act during the 2020 campaign, and that the administration had allowed the violations to go unpunished.

Progressives were right to object, and it is worth saying why without pretending the problem began in 2017. Officials of both parties have been found to have crossed the line, including members of President Obama's and President Biden's administrations, usually with an apology and a lesson. The difference that mattered in 2019 and 2020 was not the existence of violations but the open statement from the top that they did not matter. A law that relies on the president to discipline his own advisers depends entirely on the president caring.

The independence of the enforcer became its own fight in 2025. In February of that year President Trump removed Hampton Dellinger, the special counsel confirmed under President Biden, even though federal law said the special counsel could be removed only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance. Dellinger sued, won early rulings from a district judge, and then dropped his case in March 2025 after an appeals court ruling went against him. The episode was one piece of a wider argument, now running through many agencies, over whether presidents may fire officials whom Congress tried to shield. The answer to that question shapes whether the Hatch Act has a referee at all.

The harder question underneath

There is a reasonable conservative critique of a large, permanent civil service: that career employees may lean one way politically and quietly resist elected leaders they dislike. Some of the 2025 push to reclassify federal jobs so that they could be filled and fired more like political posts was justified in exactly those terms. The concern is not imaginary. Voters elect a president to change policy, and a bureaucracy that drags its feet can frustrate them.

The answer the Hatch Act gives is a good one, and it cuts both ways. The deal is that career workers keep their politics out of their jobs, and in return the people in power keep their politics out of the career workforce. Employees do not campaign from their desks; supervisors do not demand loyalty to a party as a condition of a paycheck. If the response to a worry about a biased civil service is to make every job depend on political loyalty, the cure brings back the exact disease that Thomas Stokes found on the Kentucky relief rolls. The WPA worker who felt pressure to vote for the right man in 1938 and a federal scientist who feels pressure to keep quiet about inconvenient data in 2026 are in the same position: someone with power over their livelihood wants their politics.

Here is my view, labelled as such. Progressives should defend the Hatch Act even when it constrains people they agree with, because the protection only works if it is neutral. A rule that bars a Republican administration from turning agencies into campaign offices must also bar a Democratic one. The more useful work is closing the gap at the top: giving the Office of Special Counsel a way to enforce penalties against senior appointees that does not run through the president, and protecting the special counsel's own tenure.

What you can do

The line between government and campaign is drawn in law, and laws change when people press their representatives and keep watch on the institutions that enforce them.

• Ask your members of Congress where they stand on enforcement. Use the representatives lookup to find your U.S. representative and senators, their phone numbers and their latest votes, and ask whether they support giving the Office of Special Counsel real power to penalize senior political appointees.
• Follow the fight over who can fire independent officials. The cases about removal protections are reaching the Supreme Court; the Court watch page lists this term's opinions with the Court's own summaries and its emergency docket.
• Read up on what has happened to the federal workforce. Our topic page on the government gutted gathers reporting on reclassification, layoffs and the agencies that enforce civil service rules.
• If you work for the government, learn the rules for yourself. The Office of Special Counsel publishes plain-language guidance and answers questions; knowing exactly what you may do protects you from overcautious silence as much as from mistakes.
• Support groups that defend whistleblowers and civil servants. The organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause and state, including good-government and legal aid groups.

The WPA workers of 1938 had no lobby. They had a reporter willing to ask them who told them how to vote, and a senator who listened to the answer. That chain, a citizen with a question and an official who acts on it, is still how the line gets held.